VANCOUVER, British Columbia — With the Sharks one defeat away from elimination in their Western Conference finals series with the Vancouver Canucks, coach Todd McLellan had a lot on his plate Monday.

Power-play adjustments. How to get production from forwards other than Patrick Marleau and Joe Thornton — maybe even Thornton’s effectiveness after taking that hit from Raffi Torres in the third period of Sunday’s 4-2 loss. The penalty kill.

But McLellan made it clear that dealing with franchise demons — the embodiment of San Jose’s history of playoff frustration — was not on his list of things to be concerned about.

“See, I don’t think we have demons. You guys think we have demons,” he told reporters who brought up the topic. “They don’t exist in our world. We’ve had a lot of success as an organization and as a franchise.”

More specifically, he rejected the relevance of San Jose’s initial appearance in the conference finals, a series they lost to Calgary seven years ago in six games.

“We can keep referring back to the conference finals in 2004, say that we had an eight-game losing streak. I think some of you wrote that,” McLellan said. “I don’t know what the hell 2004 has to do with 2011.”

He wasn’t finished.

“We have a team that’s worked extremely hard to get to the conference finals,” McLellan said, “We’ve had a team that’s faced a lot of adversity, external adversity. The only people we answer to are ourselves in that locker room.”

Then he qualified that.

“We don’t answer to the media,” he said. “We answer to our fans somewhat at home. We owe them an effort. We owe them a commitment level second to none. But that’s it.”

Players and coaches do not look at a team’s history the way others do. To them, each season is different because circumstances have changed and rosters have changed — a new goalie, a rookie center, a veteran on the fourth line — even if the core group remains the same.

Those outside the team, of course, tend to lump together every moment that has earned the Sharks their reputation as a team that’s good enough in the regular season to win the Presidents’ Trophy, but has not made it to the Stanley Cup finals once despite talent-filled rosters.

Players back their coach when it comes to rejecting the idea of a franchise haunted by its past.

“It’s not demons that have been messing with us in the conference finals,” defenseman Douglas Murray said. “The only thing messing with us is our lack of execution and everybody not playing well enough.”

The Sharks, he added, “have done too many good things throughout the playoffs to feel that way. You probably would look at it differently if we would have lost the Detroit series.”

Defenseman Dan Boyle also sees demons as a media creation, but he understands the context.

“You guys keep bringing it up,” he said. “This team has been able to challenge for the Cup every year, realistically, for the last handful of years, and that’s something to be proud of. Ultimately, our goal is to win, and until we do, these questions are going to keep happening.”

Which gets back to Tuesday night’s Game 5 with the Sharks trailing 3-1 in the series.

“We’re still in a position to win the cup,” Boyle said. “We’re not done yet, so we’ve got to go out there and win a game.”

To do that, McLellan knows he needs to get scoring from players who have underperformed over the first four games.

“There’s others that have to give us more, no doubt about it,” the Sharks coach told reporters here. “If we plan on extending the series, those others will have to rise to the occasion.”

He didn’t identify players by name, but three of San Jose’s top offensive players — Devin Setoguchi, Dany Heatley and Joe Pavelski — have only one point each in the first four games of the conference finals. And McLellan did put Heatley into the mix when asked about him specifically.

McLellan also knows he needs his power play to return to its Game 3 form, when San Jose scored three times with the man advantage — and not deliver another zero-for-five effort as it did in Game 4. That means more adjustments to whatever adjustments the Canucks made on the penalty kill.

Knowing the challenges, the Sharks appeared to be optimistic Monday. Some of that comes from the belief that a Canucks team in position to close out the series feels pressure of its own.

“We’ve been in that position a couple times,” Clowe said, citing the Sharks’ situation against Detroit two weeks ago. “We didn’t want to go back to Detroit. We wanted to wrap it up, but we lost, and all of a sudden it gets you thinking a little bit.”

Staff writer Alex Pavlovic contributed to this report. For more on the Sharks, see David Pollak’s Working the Corners blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/sharks. Contact him at 408-920-5940.

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